Building a Module for Inserting Microformats into Moodle

Abstract

Information found nowadays on the World Wide Web is generally regarded as limitless. Hence emerged the need to find methods for organizing data in order to get better information retrieval. Organizing web content does not implicitly mean structuring data by attaching meaning to the information published on the web ? at least not yet. For instance, content management systems (CMS) are tools that provide means of organizing web data. Nevertheless only a handful of CMSs have a semantic layer. The following paper offers an in-depth description of the logic and the implementation behind the method used to integrate microformats ? also known as the ?lower-case semantic web?? into the widely known learning content management system Moodle, personalized to suit the needs of students attending the Politehnica University of Timisoara. It is an easy to use, easy to integrate solution that does not require any changes in the core of Moodle and, moreover, it does not overrun the server, as the decision block runs on the users' computer.

Keywords

• content management
• electronic learning
• information representation
• semantic Web
• Web services